No Man's Land

The Battlefields of Northern France

[Published in the Montreal Gazette, 11 November 1989 (under the
title "A Journey to Remember").]

Alfred
George Jones, 1885-1949. The photo appears to have been taken shortly
after he signed up for service on the Western Front, in time for the Battle
of the Somme, July 1916.

Arras, France. My first morning in Arras, I woke to find I had
been sharing my bed with a bullet.

It was nothing special. Just a spent rifle bullet, curiously hooked
at the tip, like a shark's tooth. I have no idea how it got there: probably
it was left behind by a souvenir-collector who'd passed through the hotel
before me.

It's even hard to say which war it came from. The bullet in my bed is
an apt symbol for the modern history of Arras. Explosive violence lurks
beneath the placid surface of the towns and villages of northern France.
Twice in this century, armies have battled back and forth across the gently
rolling landscape.

For a brief period in the early days of the First World War, the dividing
line between the French and German forces ran right across Arras's central
square. Today, that square - just outside the front door of my hotel -
shows no sign of the fighting. A short walk away, though, the gloomy façade
of the domed Arras Cathedral is still pocked and scarred by innumerable
wayward shells and bullets.

There is something apocalyptic even in the quality of the early winter
light. In Arras at this time of year, day doesn't exactly "break." Instead,
darkness gives way to faint grey. A pale light puts up a brave struggle
for a few hours, then gives up and retreats around four-thirty in the afternoon.
The sun itself is rarely seen, except indirectly: lighting the fringes
of clouds at dusk, or turning a jet's distant vapours into threads of spun
gold.

The climate is appropriate. Time seems to hang in the air; seventy years
might as well be yesterday. The impression is intensified by the scrupulous
care with which 20th-century history is signposted.

For Canadians, Arras, holds a special significance. For most of the
First World War, the Allies held the city. But just eight kilometres out
of town is Vimy Ridge.

On April 9, 1917, the four divisions of the Canadian Corps launched
their famous attack on this German front-line strongpoint. The operation
was a spectacular success - in the context of a war where "success" was
measured in yards gained. Here, as at most other points along the front,
the German army held the strategic high ground. The Canadians not only
overran the ridge but succeeded in holding it against a strong German counterattack.

In a wider sense, the Battle of Vimy Ridge was far from decisive. The
Germans had already staged a planned withdrawal to a new, heavily fortified
line, and the war still had a full year and a half to run before the Kaiser's
armies collapsed amid the carnage and chaos.

Vimy has served, instead, as a symbol for Canada: the kind of bloody
coming-of-age ritual that modern nation-states seem unable to do without.

Vimy today is a haunted place. It has been turned into a park, deeded
in perpetuity to the people of Canada. At the rear of the imposing monument
to the 60,000 Canadian dead of the First World War, a statue of a crestfallen
woman looks out from the summit of the ridge, over the plain beyond.

Vimy Ridge (photo by Adam Jones).

For the Canadian soldiers who fought their way to the spot where the
maiden now stands, the vista was an exhilarating one. "It was an
extraordinary sight, a glimpse of another world," wrote one war historian.
"Behind them lay an expanse of churned-up mud and desolation completely
commanded from where they stood. ... Below and beyond them on the German
side lay a peaceful countryside with villages that appeared from a distance
to be untouched by war."

Today, the same countryside is dotted with smokestacks and industrial
slagheaps. Far removed from the pastoral vision of the soldiers of 1917,
perhaps. But the mutilated terrain over which the Canadians launched their
attack has been preserved, and in parts even reconstructed.

There are other, more sinister reminders of the hell the soldiers left
behind them. Signs off the main tracks, among the remnants of the trench
system, warn of unexploded bombs and grenades.

Mutilated terrain at Vimy Ridge, with the memorial in the distance.
The sign in the foreground reads: "Danger - No entry - Undetonated explosives."
Photo by Adam Jones (it accompanied the article as published in the Montreal
Gazette).

Arras itself is a prosperous, attractive city, its streets crammed
with boutiques and specialty shops. The city is an hour or two by car or
train from the Channel ports of Calais and Dunkerque, and just 40 minutes
south of the industrial metropolis of Lille near the Belgian border. Tourists and travellers on all budgets will find everything from one of the most
comfortable youth hostels in Europe to three-star hotels. Car-rental offices
are conveniently located in the square across from the train station.

For the amateur war historian, the Arras area offers a further bonus.
Just half an hour away by train lies the town of Albert. This was the central
staging point for the notorious, and disastrous, British attack in July
1916 that became known as the Battle of the Somme.

The opening day of the offensive, July 1, is famous as the "Black Day
of the British Army." Owing to antiquated tactics and otherworldly optimism,
the Allies suffered an almost inconceivable 57,470 casualties in a single
day's fighting - including 20,000 killed.

For me, there is a personal connection. My grandfather, who died long
before I was born, fought with the British at the Somme. He was blown up
and buried by a German shell in no man's land. Three days later a search
party, by some astonishing chance, found him under the earth, unconscious
but still alive. He recovered. According to my father, it was an experience
he didn't talk about much.

I walked out of Albert in the footsteps of my grandfather and the countless
troops who headed for the front to mount the Somme offensive. Still standing
in the heart of Albert is the famous basilica, topped by a gilded statue
of the Virgin Mary holding aloft the Christ child. In the Great War, the
basilica was badly damaged by German shellfire, but the statue clung to
the steeple throughout the German bombardment. It became a good-luck symbol
for the Allied forces, and its precarious hold was soon strengthened (surreptitiously)
by teams of Royal Engineers, who recognized its importance to troop morale.

It is a disquieting sensation to stroll across the terrain for which
so many thousands fought and died. I stood for a while on the lip of the
Lochnager Mine Crater, a couple of kilometres outside Albert, near the
village of La Boisselle. The Lochnager Mine was the largest of a series
detonated under German lines to start the Somme offensive. It left behind
an awesome bowl in the earth, as though a meteorite had struck. After the
war, the land was purchased as a testament to the crater's role as a place
of refuge for the numerous troops who spent July 1 pinned down by German
machine guns. You can see the hill-line from which British forces attacked
at dawn, walking at a rigid parade-ground pace into the steel hail of the
German machine-gunners.

A memorial at nearby Thiepval commemorates some 70,000 British soldiers
who went missing over the four-and-a-half months of the "battle." The Allies
suffered 630,000 casualties in those few months, but never penetrated more
than eight kilometres behind German lines.

Newfoundlanders, who were at that time citizens of a separate crown
colony, have a special link to the Somme. A few kilometres along the road
from Albert to the village of Beaumont Hamel lies the Newfoundland Memorial
Park. Here, under the eye of a bronze caribou, is the ground the Newfoundland
battalion crossed as it launched its part of the July 1 offensive. The
attack turned into a massacre, and the Newfoundlanders suffered one of
the most withering casualty rates of that whole horrifying day.

The terrain is even better preserved than at Vimy, and more haunting.
The front-line trenches are clearly marked. You can stand on the German
parapets and imagine the waves of Newfoundlanders stumbling across a hundred
metres of barbed wire and corpse-strewn earth.

Beaumont Hamel was their objective - today, just a short walk from the
Memorial park, down a muddy farmer's path. The village was not taken until
November 1916, by the 51st (Highland) Division; the 51st's battle
fatalities were buried in a large shell-hole, which is now a cemetery at
the far end of the park.

A tour of the Somme battlefields is best made by car, although a considerable
stretch, from Albert to Beaumont Hamel, is accessible on foot. For those
without vehicles or the means to rent them, local farmers and townsfolk
are friendly, and will usually stop to give lifts farther up or down the
line. Martin Middlebrook's classic account, The First Day on the Somme,
includes an extensive appendix and maps giving a detailed description of
the battle features still visible.

When I visited, the Somme farmers were waiting for the spring plowing.
If past years are any indication, that plowing would probably turn over
more relics of the Somme offensive: spent (or unexploded) shells, helmets,
insignias. Almost certainly, too, a few more old bones from no man's land
would percolate to the surface. As in the past, they would be disinterred
and moved to graves in one of the dozens of cemeteries in the area, under
headstones reading: "A soldier of the Great War ... known to God."